Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Timothy Ritzmann, University of Nottingham
Award: £50,010.33
Awarded July 2021
Ependymoma is a devastating childhood brain tumour. Despite treatment, it comes back in half of affected children and sadly most of these die. As current treatments do not work well, one option is to try a new approach called immunotherapy. However, to make immunotherapy effective we need to know more about the subtypes of ependymoma and how they work.
Dr Timothy Ritzmann’s team at the University of Nottingham have now identified several ependymoma types, the most common being an aggressive type affecting young children called posterior fossa A ependymoma (PFA). Working with partners in Denver USA, Dr Ritzmann has shown that PFAs are composed not only of several types of tumour cells, but also several types of immune cells (cells that usually fight infection). To develop better treatments, including immunotherapy, researchers need to know more about these cell types.
The team will be focussing on three questions:
- Where in ependymomas are the cell types found?
- Are there differences in the proportion of cell types between different ependymomas?
- Do changes in cell types affect survival?
To answer these questions, they will use an exciting new technique called Multiplex Immunofluorescence to look at many cell types in one picture. Using separate collections of tumours from Nottingham and Denver, the researchers will stain cells with coloured markers and detect them using advanced computer software. This will provide detail about the cell types present in each tumour, including number, location and distance from other cells.
This project involves multple ependymoma world experts. Professor Grundy’s group at the Children’s Brain Tumour Research Centre in Nottingham will lead the project, headed by Dr Ritzmann. They will also work closely with a group in Denver, led by Professor Foreman. The overall goal is to identify individual ependymoma cells, understand how these cells differ between tumours and discover how this impacts survival. Dr Ritzmann hopes that this information will assist the development of future ependymoma treatment.